Midnight Haul (18 page)

“Yes, but about what? What really is going on here in Greenwood?”

“Kemco is killing people.”

“Be specific, Mr. Crane.”

“Boone, and the others, your husband included, stumbled onto something Kemco wanted kept quiet. The illegal hazardous waste dumping, I imagine.”

“Are you sure? That’s not the sort of crime you go around killing people over.”

“Kemco’s capable of it. Kemco’s capable of anything.”

“Mr. Crane, you’re talking about Kemco as if it were a person, an entity, a monster. That just isn’t the reality of it.”

“I used to think that way, Mrs. Price. I know the truth now. I’d blow the goddamn place up, if I thought it would do any good. If there weren’t a hundred more goddamn plants that would need blowing up as well.”

She touched his hand. “Mr. Crane. Try to keep your self-control.”

“I am. I’m fine.”

“Have you considered that perhaps Ms. Boone’s research turned something else up? I know she’d compiled disturbing statistics about diseases among Kemco employees and their families. But I understand there was a fire at her home, not long before she
allegedly
took an overdose of sleeping pills. Was her research material destroyed?”

“Yes.”

“If someone is killing people and making it seem like suicide, they’re doing a thorough job of it; each victim’s been a likely candidate for self-destruction. Is it true her husband had filed for custody of Billy?”

“Yes. Where did you hear that?”

“It’s a small town, Mr. Crane.”

“So everyone tells me. But nobody seems to be overly concerned about a galloping suicide rate.”

“Too many people collect Kemco paychecks, here, Mr. Crane, to get overly concerned about anything. In times like these, a paycheck comes in handy. The suicide rate—and the cancer rate—would have to go considerably higher before Greenwood would wake up.”

“I’ll wake them up. I’ll wake everybody up.”

“How?”

He smiled. “You see, I’m the next victim.”

“What?”

“I went out to Kemco yesterday. I made myself noticed. So they’ll be coming around to see me. To try to make a suicide out of me. Or accident, or whatever. Only I’ll be waiting.”

“Is that why you didn’t sleep last night?”

“I sat up in bed with a gun. And I’ll do that every night until they come. And then we’ll see. We’ll just see.”

“Mr. Crane. You’ve got to get hold of yourself. You should get some rest.”

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you really know what’s happening here in Greenwood.”

“Do you?”

“No. I might have an idea, though.”

“Yes? What?”

“I told you you started me thinking. It’s about all I’ve been able to do at night, is think. I drove Harry away—he’s the gentleman employed at Kemco, I’d been seeing—and I’ve jeopardized some longstanding friendships, by asking embarrassing questions of people like Ralph Foster, a local merchant who’s the part-time mayor. All because you got me thinking. It made me consider some of the research Ms. Boone has done… the illnesses. Take for example the skin rashes. I’ve seen more children with skin rashes in the last three years than in all my previous years of teaching combined. And then there’s the inordinate number of absences we’ve had at Greenwood Elementary, the past several years. Chronic attendance problems that I think have been misinterpreted. There have been PTA meetings at which parents have been castigated for letting their children play sick. At these meetings always a few indignant parents would insist that they have done no such thing: that a sick child is a sick child and a sick child stays home. But with changing mores in this country, attendance problems have naturally been considered a disciplinary problem, not a health problem.”

“I have a friend,” Crane said, “who wondered why the children and spouses of Kemco employees would be affected by negligent conditions at a plant twenty-some miles away.”

“The same thought occurred to me. Do you remember my mentioning to you that the school is built on ground donated to the city by Kemco?”

“Yes…”

“The school grounds, and the playground across the street, as well… land given the city twenty years ago by Kemco.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what the west edge of Greenwood was, twenty years ago?”

“No.”

“A household dump. A landfill. Operated by Kemco, for use by the city as its dump, and for Kemco’s own disposal of certain nonhazardous wastes. Or so the mayor told me. But a thought crossed my mind… if Kemco is engaging in illegal dumping of hazardous wastes today, a time of environmental concern… what do you suppose they were doing twenty years ago?”

Crane was shaking. He felt himself shaking. Was
this
what Mary Beth and the others had discovered? Was this what Boone had discovered? Why her book was burned? Why she now lay in a coma?

“So one has to wonder,” Mrs. Price was saying. “What’s buried across the street, under the playground? Last month I saw children playing over there—they picked up rocks and threw them at the sidewalk and watched the pretty colors the ‘fire rocks’ made.”

He had seen that. Crane had seen that and at the time thought nothing of it: Billy and his friends hurling that rock at the sidewalk and the flash of bright color.

“One has to wonder,” Mrs. Price said. She pointed at the floor. “What’s buried down there?”

They pulled him out of bed and onto the floor and had the tape over his mouth before he was fully awake.

He didn’t remember falling asleep. He’d watched everything there was to watch on television, which had taken him till around two. He’d read some magazines and started a paperback and had read until his burning eyes wouldn’t let him read any longer. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had any sleep: he’d slept for two hours this afternoon, after seeing Mrs. Price. When his travel alarm had woken him, he’d walked downtown to eat at that pizza place again and walked back to the room to watch TV and read and wait in bed with the reading lamp on and the gun in his hand.

The gun was in somebody else’s hand, now. It was in the hand of one of the two men who’d pulled him out of bed. The one who had put the tape on his mouth. The other man was beside Crane, on the floor by the bed, tying Crane’s hands in front of him.

They wore ski masks, red-and-black, a matched set. The one with Crane’s gun was a tall skinny guy in a green-and black-plaid hunting jacket; the other one, standing up now, pulling Crane up by the arm, wasn’t as tall, but was wide in the shoulders and wore a black quilted mountain vest and long-sleeved dirty black sweatshirt that hugged his massive arms.

The truckers.

The two men he and Boone had seen dumping drums of waste, in Pennsylvania, weeks ago.

Crane dove head first into the tall skinny guy, gun or no gun, knocking the wind out of him, knocking him down, scrambled over him, got on his feet again, got to the door, but it was closed, and with his hands tied he couldn’t open it, and by the time he thought of trying for a window to fling himself through, the bruiser was on him, grabbing both his elbows behind him and pulling his arms back like chicken wings. The pain was sharp; nearly blacked him out.

The skinny one got up, recovered the gun, went over to the lamp. Switched it off. Then he walked to the door, opened it, peeked out, looked to the right, to the left, nodded to the bruiser, who kept hold of Crane’s elbows from behind and walked him out into the motel parking lot.

The motel’s sign was off. There was no one around; it had to be three-thirty or four in the morning. Still, the two men were cautious. They walked him down to the place where the parking lot went around the back end of the building, where they had parked a battered old pick-up truck, with a couple of steel drums in the back, fifty-five-gallon barrels like the ones the waste had been dumped in.

The skinny one lowered the tailgate and climbed up on the bed of the pick-up. Then the bruiser lifted Crane up to him, like a child from one parent to another, the bruiser’s hands on Crane’s waist, the skinny guy pulling Crane up and in by one arm, which hurt nearly as much as having his elbows yanked back. He felt an involuntary cry come out of him and get caught by the slash of tape across his mouth.

Then the bruiser climbed up and locked Crane around the waist from behind and lifted him up and set him inside one of the steel drums.

Crane just stood there, the rim coming up to his rib cage, and looked back at the masked faces of the trucker; for the first time
he noticed how cold it was: he was in his T-shirt and jeans and it was fucking cold.

Then the bruiser started pushing on Crane’s shoulders, shoving him down, and finally Crane got the picture: they wanted him down inside the drum. He resisted for a moment, but it was useless. He crouched within the drum, squeezing himself in, tucking his knees up between the loop of his arms, his hands bound at the wrist by rope, his knuckles scraping the steel of the drum. The steel of its rounded sides seemed to touch him everywhere, in fact, but still he managed to sit, the top of his head six inches or more from the top of the barrel, and he looked up.

And saw the lid coming down.

He couldn’t have felt more helpless. The sound of the lid being hammered down wasn’t really loud: they were tapping the lid in place with a pair of hammers, doing it easily, not wanting to attract attention; but he never heard anything louder. He never heard anything that echoed so.

He stared up at total blackness.

He sat in total silence.

No, not
total
silence: there was his own breathing, a desperate, snorting sound, breathing through his nose. Already the air seemed stale. Already his muscles seemed cramped. Already claustrophobia was closing in.

Then, another sound: the motor starting up.

Hearing that sound, any sound, was almost reassuring to him.

I’m not dead yet
, he thought.
I may be in a steel coffin, but I’m not dead yet
.

He heard the wheels of the pick-up grind against the gravel of the motel parking lot, then pull onto the street, and the ride began.

Some of it—the first half hour—was on blacktop. The barrel swayed, on the turns, lifting off its bottom tilting just a bit, but never falling over, thanks to the balance he was providing. He began to feel numb. He began not to breathe so hard. The coldness
stopped bothering him. He became almost lulled by the darkness, the blacktop road they were rolling over.

Then they hit gravel again, and it was bumpy, and a chuckhole sent the drum clanging into the side of the pick-up and he cracked the side of his head and the pain sent some tears down his cheeks, but the pain wasn’t so bad, really. It was something to do.

Is this what death is like?
he wondered.
Is it darkness? Is it lack of sensation? Coldness that stops being cold? Pain that stops hurting? Mary Beth, is this death? Boone—is this a coma?

They were pulling in somewhere, slowing down.

Stopping.

Motor still going.

The door on the rider’s side was opening. Someone was getting out. Footsteps on gravel. A gate opening, metallic sounding. Footsteps on gravel again. Back in the pick-up. Door closing.

The pick-up was moving again. Slowly, now.

Then it stopped.

Both doors opened. Footsteps on hard earth. The tailgate was lowered. He heard one of the men hop up onto the bed of the pick-up.

And tipped the barrel over. The side of his head slammed into the side of the drum, stunning him, and then they were rolling him, the barrel and him, and the metal of the pick-up bed and the metal of the drum clashed, and he held his neck muscles tight to keep his head from getting banged.

They rolled him only to the edge of the pick-up, then set him down on the ground, rather gently actually.

Then they were rolling him again, and he pulled his neck muscles in tight, but Christ, they were rolling him, rolling him, and he was getting dizzy, so dizzy…

Then he felt himself, and the drum around him, go off the edge of something.

It wasn’t a long drop. Maybe six feet. The side of him slammed into the side of the barrel, when it landed, but it didn’t hurt him.
He didn’t feel it much. The drum seemed to be sitting at an angle, but he couldn’t be sure.

Then he heard one of the men talking to the other. It was the first time he’d heard them speak, but he couldn’t make out any of what was being said.

One of the men came down in the hole and straightened the barrel, so that it and Crane were sitting upright. Nice of him.

A few minutes passed. Silence. A certain calm settled over him, as he sat in his drum, in his fetal position, waiting. Waiting for them to kill him.

Then he heard it: something dropping on the top of the lid of the barrel, like rain. Then it was heavier, more like hail.

Dirt.

They were burying him.

He tried to scream, but the tape across his mouth wouldn’t let him.

He didn’t know how long he’d been buried. The truckers would be gone, by now. He was cold. The stale air seemed to cling to him; so did the darkness. He wondered how long he could last. How long before he would suffocate.

His hands were almost free. He was gradually working one hand down through the knotted loop around his now rope-burned wrists, scraping his knuckles till they bled, which felt good to him, made him feel a little less dead, and then his hands were free and he tore the tape from his lips and began to yell.

Someone would hear him. Someone had to hear.

He yelled until his throat was raw, his voice a hoarse whisper, his ears ringing with the sound he’d made that only he’d heard.

No one would hear him. Who was he kidding? The truckers had obviously dumped him in the country someplace. A landfill, maybe, judging from the sound of the gate that had been opened before the truck drove in to where he’d been dumped. And who would be around at a landfill before dawn, to hear him scream? Nobody. Whoever worked here might come around seven-thirty or eight, but that was hours away; would his air supply last that long? He didn’t suppose this thing was airtight, but then he’d heard them filling the hole around him with dirt, and he knew there was dirt over him: no, he’d suffocate before anybody found him. If they found him. Who was to say he’d
ever be found at all? Just something else Kemco had buried and forgotten.